Bidfood finds the perfect archiving solution along with an improved security posture

14 July 2021
Bidfood girl

About Bidfood

With over 2,200 staff and 17 regional locations from Whangarei to Invercargill, Bidfood is one of the largest wholesale food distributors in the country. Bidfood provides the foodservice and hospitality industry with a wide range of over 20,000 products. It services all sizes of business, from small cafes to major chains while maintaining their vision to provide everything their customers need to produce culinary magic and realise their visions on the plate.

 

The Challenge

Legally, Bidfood is required to keep certain communications around food safety for a minimum of 10 years. With such a huge amount of information residing in the system, finding a way to easily archive, manage and access that data when required had become a challenging task.


“Initially, we were purely interested in an archiving solution. We are a big proponent of open source here but there wasn’t an open source archiving tool that was a viable option for us,” explained Bidfood CIO, Dan Morgan. “Some of our mailboxes are extraordinarily large.” With a background in security, Dan wanted a solution that would strengthen Bidfood’s security posture, rather than just a standalone archiving solution.

At the time, Softsource vBridge (formerly Softsource) approached Bidfood for an initial meeting to discuss their requirements for an archiving solution with a strong focus around security. Softsource vBridge placed great value on understanding the unique requirements and doing a discovery of the significant challenges Bidfood was facing. With an older on-premise gateway process for managing their email security system, a lot of spam emails were directed straight to their users inboxes. This was causing three challenges: posing a considerable security risk to their system, creating an overload of enquiries for their helpdesk, and reducing productivity for the business.

 


The Solution

As a trusted advisor Softsource vBridge offered a holistic approach to address these challenges and recommended the Mimecast Cloud Archive solution along with the Mimecast’s Targeted Treat Protection solution.
Mimecast Cloud Archive solution is designed to provide access to archive data anytime, anywhere, protecting and preserving it, all while simplifying management and administration. By aggregating data across multiple platforms, businesses can create a secure, digital corporate memory while reducing costs and risks for legal and compliance teams. IT teams can reduce administrative overhead with streamlined management and simplified data recovery.
It was the perfect solution for Bidfood to bring under control their archiving system.
“Prior to having Mimecast, I performed a test to restore our Exchange database. In comparison, the last restore test we did with Mimecast took half as long, which is clearly a massive improvement,” said Morgan. 

Around 85% of Bidfood’s business comes through its e-commerce platform, with the other 15% via phone and email. To have email downtime would be a critical situation, not just in terms of potential lost orders but also because from time to time, the company receives product recall orders via email. Such
emails simply cannot be missed.

“To have the always-on capability that Mimecast solutions provide means that I can turn our Exchange servers off but people still get their messages. Once a product recall lands, we have our own method for recording it that isn’t so reliant on email, so downtime is not an option for that. If you get a product recall wrong, people could die. It’s as simple as that,” explained Morgan.

Mimecast Cloud Archive’s search functionality has been a big plus for Bidfood’s staff.

 

Bidfood 2

“The biggest feedback I’ve received from my users is that they love the search functionality with Mimecast Cloud Archive because they can limit the timeframes of searches, focus solely on attachments, and so on. It’s just quick, intuitive and produces way more accurate and relevant results than a traditional email search.”

Dan Morgan, Bidfood CIO

Targeted Threat Protection

Mimecast Targeted Threat Protection solution detects and stops sophisticated phishing attacks with multi-layered defences and enforces information security policies and provides detailed information on all delivered and blocked email.

“To have that extra layer between our network and the bad guys has been a huge relief,” said Morgan.

Prior to engaging Softsource vBridge, Bidfood did its own internal phishing test and staff security training. 99% of the time, staff were able to flag suspicious emails and links to IT before they actioned it, but the number of malicious messages that were still landing in staff inboxes was a red flag for Dan.

“The measures that we took to train up our staff meant that we captured these messages before they caused any harm, but they shouldn’t have got through undetected in the first place. Email is the primary vector these days, and we knew we had to strengthen our borders,” said Morgan.

Bidfood’s email was the company’s weak point when it came to network security. “It only takes one user to click on one link, then you’ve had it. A business we have a close association with had that exact scenario. They were hit just prior to Christmas, which is the busiest time of the year for us globally as a business. The impact was massive. That’s simply not an acceptable situation for us.

Greater Confidence

Thanks to Softsource vBridge and Mimecast’s Threat Protection solution, Morgan and the entire executive team at Bidfood are now a lot happier about their security posture.

“Now that we’ve got Mimecast Targeted Threat Protection in place, I’m a lot more confident that a bad link is much less likely to get through.”

Calls to the helpdesk team have also been dramatically reduced, as they are no longer having to deal with multiple tickets every day which ask whether an email attachment or link is ok. The rogue emails simply aren’t getting through in the first place.


The results
Together with Mimecast, Softsource vBridge has helped Bidfood to ease the management and access of its considerable archive, tighten up its email security so that malicious emails are intercepted and dealt with before they reach employee inbox, and provide regular insights into how the company’s security performance is
tracking.

Bidfood’s IT support staff have much more available time to focus on projects that will help grow the business now that they have to deal with far less email security questions from staff. The company’s IT security and executive team can now rest easy knowing that they have an extra layer of protection and the treat of their network being compromised has been diminished.

Get in touch with us today to discuss your requirements and find out how we can help to improve your business security.

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